ALTERNATIVES : example number 2

Carl Rogers remains for me significant. His work with social-psychology may be old fashioned today but his basic insights remain, for me, intact. If any alternative way is to be found for our 21st century Carl Rogers and the 1950s might just find favour. In my last post I displayed a poem by Malaguzzi and asked for this 100 ways of Humanitas to be one of the keys for policy. Today I turn to a social psychology that might just make a difference and help us all, just well enough, along this less travelled pathway. Carl Rogers is well worth returning with. I say this in two ways :-

a) His valid attempt to link the social with the individual through creativity and the basic needs of both society and the person may be another reasonable starting point for policy and decision-making. Society and the personal self are intertwined but there remains a kind of basic set of needs if all are to flourish. This approach avoids any one dimensional psychology or sociology and a creative possibility is encouraged thereby. In a word the insipid "me, me, ,me" self is balanced out by a social-self. That I believe is another starting point for an alternative dynamic. This may be a rather old fashioned approach but it remains, for me, an essential one.

b) Carl Rogers also talked of those basic aspects of the good life and well being. There is, he said, a sure connection between basic ways of food, shelter and clothes and all that with, at the same time, a sense of community and folk. These two aspects of life are essential even in a postmodern world. Then as a third connection there is that sense of a personal activeness where the "self" is "actualised" and vitally alive. This kind of three dimensional existence may be difficult ( hopefully impossible) to standardise or measure but it remains one cornerstone for life itself as well lived.

The point here is to come clean. To say what informs judgement and to reply to those that ask for alternatives to be more than mere critique. It is all to easy to blast out critical stuff without a basic foundation ( oopps a bad word there?) so I hope that this is a second grounding for alternatives and the future.

To ask new questions and to be critical is great stuff but foundations remain even if only in the head before the pen. Hope this links ok with that poem of 100 ways. I also hope this post is seen as a valid response to those that, quite rightly, ask for a few basic groundings that inform critical texts.

Shit - after reading my stuff above a stiff drink is needed. Must do better and really get to more basic things. Yellow Duck has more sex on his site now. Visit. Eastern stuff is in vogue it seems. Shut up Zola you have already fucked up the day.